Central station redundancy and its significance is essential to understand. A select group have maintained redundancy over the years, although UL hasn’t mandated redundancy until recently. Redundancy provides peace of mind to central station owners, dealers and subscribers, and is incredibly valuable when navigating through the effects of natural disasters.
A central station is composed of four major elements — human resources, computer automation, telecommunications and networking and connectivity. It is my belief that when a central station claims to have redundancy, the redundancy must consider all major elements. I have experienced claims of redundancy where a central station only maintains one of these elements. With the UL standard, central stations are required to have redundancy based upon their size (MEW Factor).